Don’t you just hate it when your Business Analysts (or others) beat you to it and point out bugs before you have a chance to?

It feels so unfair! They can send an email that says, “the columns aren’t in the right order, please fix it” and the programmers snap to attention like good little soldiers. Whereas, you saw the same problem but you are investigating further and confirming your findings with multiple oracles.

Well, this is not a bug race. There is no “my bug”. If someone else on your team is reporting problems, this helps you. And it certainly helps the team. You may want to observe the types of things these non-testers report and adjust your testing to target other testing.

But try to convert your frustration to admiration. Tell them “nice catch” and “thanks for the help”. Encourage more of the same.

An attitude change is definitely required in these types of occurrences.

In addition to changing your testing behavior to catch other bugs, perhaps you can add your findings to what the Business Analyst or other person found. Good reproduction steps, database backups, screenshots, etc will all help the team understand the problem.

I agree that it's not pleasant to receive such bug reports from clients, but we need a little color in this job, or else it gets boooring.

But maybe we shouldn't look at a bug and investigate it from one hundred points of view, maybe we just need to find and report it, and I'm talking only about bugs that really don't need thorough investigations.

Who am I?

My typical day: get up, maybe hit the gym, drop my kids off at daycare, listen to a podcast or public radio, do not drink coffee (I kicked it), test software or help others test it, break for lunch and a Euro-board game, try to improve the way we test, walk the dog and kids, enjoy a meal with Melissa, an IPA, and a movie/TV show, look forward to a weekend of hanging out with my daughter Josie, son Haakon, and perhaps a woodworking or woodturning project.